Wednesday's sessions at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference were just as exciting as Tuesday's. The sessions today focused more on technology in emerging markets, digital rights, and biology. The day began again with a cool game from Megaphone and then continued in an excellent series of sessions:
- Quinn Norton channeled Walt Whitman to explore the implications of "body hacking" in a talk entitled "I Sing the Body Electric." She discussed topics ranging from recreational use of the drug Provigil to the cultural impact and history of the world's most popular smart drug: caffeine. Norton also critiqued the ethical issues surrounding steroids in the context of Tommy John surgery.
- In the afternoon, a group called Regional provided photos and examples of how digital technologies are producing change (and also being used to restrict freedoms) in Cuba. They painted a remarkable picture of how World 1 typically takes its version of the Internet for granted by showing the restrictive, "intranet" nature of Cuban cyberculture. The New York Times is running an article covering many of the same subjects discussed in Regional's session on Wednesday, for those wanting more information.
- Larry Lessig gave the evening keynote on Wednesday night. Lessig is a lawyer who was instrumental in the creation of the Creative Commons license and is now shifting his focus away from copyright to reform in the American political arena through his Change Congress project. He discussed the impact that technologists can have on effecting social change in the political landscape on many fronts, which could pave the way for a confrontation that some at the conference called "the [Silicon] Valley vs. the Beltway." It will be interesting to track whether his call to arms creates more political accountability technologies like the Sunlight Foundation, Maplight.org, and OpenCongress.
There were several other interesting talks on Wednesday:
- The morning keynote was John McCarthy, an old-school computer scientist who coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955. He spoke about a new programming language, Elephant 2000, that he sees as a language for 2015. He used the example of making a flight reservation to show how the programming language would work, but his talk went long before he could get to his prime example of how to use the language.
- Kathy Sierra gave a talk on how to become an expert at a hobby or interest by using principles derived from the latest advancements in neuroscience. She provided 9 "expertise hacks" to help break out of routines and develop expertise in any area.
- Sierra's talk on expertise was followed by Tom Coates announcing the beta launch of a new service called Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle hopes use the location data that someone provides to enable other web services to create new applications in location-based services. The spread of LBS is an important theme at the conference.
- One of my favorite talks came from Bug Labs, a company in the open source hardware space that creates modular devices that connect together like Legos. The devices include cameras, GPS units, and accelerometers that can be attached or detached depending on the features the user wants. Bug Labs also has a software community that is building services on top of the location data, motion data, or photos provided by the various devices. The presenters described open source hardware, and Bug Labs in particular, as enabling a long tail of gadgets, so that consumer electronics as an industry would no longer be dependent on economies of scale for innovations to reach the market. I'm excited to watch how Bug Labs develops over the next year.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal group that takes on cases involving digital rights, hosted a panel entitled "On a Brighter Note..." describing the issues threatening freedom and security on the Net. They addressed a range of issues, including the use of consumer data by Web 2.0 companies, and the dangers to privacy in emerging computing paradigms like cloud computing.
- Kentaro Toyama of Microsoft Research gave an overview of his team's work in developing computing solutions for impoverished villages in India using three technologies: 1) simultaneous shared access, or many kids having control over a single computer at one time, 2) text-free user interfaces, developed to enable illiterate women to find jobs on a service similar to Monster.com, and 3) Digital Green, a project designed to help spread agicultural best practices to farmers using videos.
- Nathan Eagle, an MIT researcher at the forefront of reality mining, recounted his research on using data collected from mobile phones to create more accurate models of reality. He showed that a startlingly accurate method of predicting someone's location and social interactions can be developed from just a few months' worth of data collected from someone's phone.
The evening wrapped up with an art festival showcasing the intersection of art and technology similar to the MoMA's current "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit. One cool project was from Socialbomb.net. They have developed a device for creating a game out of social interactions based around gaining points for socializing for a longer period of time.
Overall another great day at the conference. I'm looking forward to sharing more tomorrow!
Image: eschipul (Flickr)
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